Chino, Japan, Jan. 8, 2021—In Japan, newspapers, magazines, TV, and website media are flooded with ads promoting classes and lessons for vocational certification and licenses for a whole gamut of jobs and pleasure.
Those qualifications, many of them certified by the government, range from pharmacy back office specialists, financial planners, food and dietary advisors, Microsoft Office specialists, cooks, vegetable professionals, smart phone ‘smart use’ specialists, and even road construction safety flagging workers.
The Japanese people, many in their mid-careers, attend vocational classes and lessons offered by qualification schools for steep fees. Those schools are thriving as the people looking for next jobs are eager to obtain government-recognized certificates’ and/or ‘graduation certificates’ issued from those schools — no matter what their academic reputations are and that the certificates carry hardly any legal power like the driver’s license.
Of course, there are serious qualifications that require years of studying and experience and demand strict licensing standards: CPAs, tax accountants, school teachers, doctors, nurses, driving schools, and so on.
The fresh addition to those traditional certification and licensing schools are precisely what Japan’s bureaucracy-tilting society is about now: No matter how they look like and behave off the main societal norms, Japanese Gen-Z are far more conformist-oriented than the post-WWII generations. Few attempt to take risks of dropping out of college and go on global trotting or venture start-up businesses. The thriving vocational schools underscore precisely their conservatism attitude.
The bureaucracy clearly recognizes the the public’s popularity of certification and licenses. The government is encouraging, for example, security companies to form associations, recommending that those lobbies offer lessons, seminars and classes about the works of private security guards and how to become one. A government-certified NPO in Nagano Prefecture in central Japan requires people that want to join obtain prefecture-issued certificates to use chainsaws. Numerous other kinds of qualifications and licenses-in-kind are asked or made compulsory for work and even pleasure.
Analyzing why the Japanese people are willing to obtain such licenses and qualifications, I have come to speculate that, on top of using them as tools for securing jobs, the people nurture their job and pleasure skills with them. Certificates for flower arrangement, old songs and instruments, tea ceremonies have been around for centuries, and even now, people are willing to pay steep tuitions to teachers to get a certificate.
Ever savvy at creating work for themselves, Japanese bureaucrats seized on this old system loved by people for their interventions, typically by forming associations, non-profits and so on, on which they surreptitiously install retired bureaucrat OBs and OGs.
Those that challenge often are disappointed as in the old adage, ‘The nail that sticks out shall be hammered’ — and reeducated as ‘an ordinary person’ like Mao did to the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution.
Shusaku Chiba (1793-1855) is one of those: A master swordsman during the closing era of the Edo period, Shusaku in 1822 easily beat Yahei Koizumi, who was nationally renowned as the best and strongest samurai and head trainer for Tokugawa Shogunate samurai and the head swordsman of the Maniwa Nenryu School.
Shusaku was chased by hundreds of Koizumi’s Maniwa Nenryu proteges and gangsters who attempted to recapture the school’s national fame. Shusaku managed to escape and the Tokugawa government authorized to manage swordsmanship schools in recognition of his skills while helping the Maniwa Nenryu school redeem its dmaged fame. Both Shusaku’s and Maniwa’s schools were said to have drawn many students that were vying to obtain respective swordsmanship’s licenses.
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Insight Into the Future